The European Commission's competition authority is an attraction for American companies looking for help with their anti-trust concerns. It has already acted on behalf of such well-loved companies as RealNetworks, while trousering a useful $613 million from Microsoft. AMD filed an anti-trust complaint against Intel in the US in 2005, following an earlier success in Japan, and now it is looking for a piece of the European action. The EC not actually knowing what CPU stands for is unlikely to be a problem.

The EC's press release says: "The European Commission can confirm that it has sent a Statement of Objections (SO) to Intel on 26th July 2007. The SO outlines the Commission's preliminary view that Intel has infringed the EC Treaty rules on abuse of a dominant position (Article 82) with the aim of excluding its main rival, AMD, from the x86 Computer Processing Units (CPU) market."

The complaints are as follows:

First, Intel has provided substantial rebates to various Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) conditional on them obtaining all or the great majority of their CPU requirements from Intel. Secondly, in a number of instances, Intel made payments in order to induce an OEM to either delay or cancel the launch of a product line incorporating an AMD-based CPU. Thirdly, in the context of bids against AMD-based products for strategic customers in the server segment of the market, Intel has offered CPUs on average below cost.

All of these look like monopoly abuse, says the EC, and all three together "reinforce each other and are part of a single overall anti-competitive strategy."

The first point is something that Microsoft has long been prevented from doing, following a US anti-trust case brought by Janet Reno in the mid-90s. The second and third points are things I'm not aware of Microsoft doing, but I think the third would generally be considered to carry some risk of being accused of monopoly abuse. So while I'm not a lawyer, I'd guess the odds are against Intel, at least in the EC case.

Intel's brief response is that its "conduct has been lawful, pro-competitive, and beneficial to consumers." Also, it points out that: "The case is based on complaints from a direct competitor rather than customers or consumers."

It would be more interesting to see Intel's responses to the specific points raised in the US case, and presumably repeated in the European case.